Unified Vision

To Ralph Howell, Anything's a Camera. Just Poke a Pin Through It.

You could call it the wide-angle definition of photography. St.
Mary’s Hall photography teacher Ralph Howell has made cameras out
of coconuts, old lunchboxes, vegetables just about any hollow object
that can be made lightproof and punctured with a pin. His application
of the pinhole camera to his San Antonio school’s curriculum has
been just as inclusive.

With the idea that students in many of the private K-12
school’s classes could benefit from a look at "what’s
hidden behind conventional representation," as Howell puts it, this
past spring he transformed a carnival wagon used as a school-musical
prop into a camera obscura Latin for "darkened room." In effect, he
created a walk-in pinhole camera, allowing creative writing, visual
arts, and physics classes, as well as his own photography students, to
experience the dreamlike, upside-down images projected inside. "Almost
all of the students reacted with surprise and awe," Howell says.

—Oscar Williams

Taking as their starting point the 5-foot-by-7-foot images projected
inside the giant camera through the pinhole, Howell and other teachers
created a series of interdisciplinary class projects. Drawing classes
sketched the sometimes surreal scenes. Creative writing classes came up
with narratives exploring the idea of perspective. Physics classes
studied light and the way the eye processes images. "I used pinhole
photography before, but now it all comes together," said freshman
Brittany Meyer, whose physics and photography classes both participated
in the project. "It’s a whole different perspective, and the
fish-eye image it produces is so different from anything else," said
senior Katie Pace, who was part of St. Mary’s creative writing
class.

Howell hopes to eventually stage a cross-curricular exhibit of
student work inspired by the camera, and he plans to continue the
project this school year with any teacher who shares his fascination
for its ability to reframe the boundaries of a subject. Pinhole cameras
are "anything but routine. They give me a lot of room for
experimentation, and the photographic results are often surprising," he
says. "The process keeps me going."

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